This past weekend, Shelly (Quaint Revival) asked a few questions about toys in her SoCS post, including if we ever made toys. I told her I’d have to answer that in a blog post because my comment was already heading to blog post length.
I tended to make toys my mother wouldn’t buy for me or even let me buy. For example, she would not let me have a slingshot. However, it was pretty easy to find a Y-shaped piece of tree branch from which a slingshot could easily be carved. She would not let me have a toy bow and arrow. She would let me buy a kite, and when the paper fabric of the kite tore, it was pretty easy to fashion a bow from the long brace of the kite and two arrows from the short brace. Each piece already had a notch cut at the end—perfect for holding kite string.
One time, I saw a project in Popular Mechanics for building a mousetrap cannon. It was in a magazine, so it must be safe—right? I bought the magazine with my allowance and asked my dad if I could make the project. He must have had the same “it’s in a magazine” thought as I did, and he gave me permission. He told me I could look around for scrap in his workshop to build it and he gave me a little extra money to buy the mousetrap.
The image shown is similar to the one in the plan, except the one in the magazine specified a piece of ½ inch copper pipe to be used as a barrel. I found some wood, a piece of ¾ inch iron pipe, and I went to the hardware store and bought a rat trap. The ammunition was supposed to be the little pencils used for keeping score in golf or miniature golf. I used one of the big round pencils they started you off with in Kindergarten.
I built my cannon, and it worked well. A friend and I we shooting it outside. A few days later, a friend of my father was visiting, and he noticed the magazine. He asked what I was making. Then he asked if he could see the cannon. He wanted to see it in action. I loaded it, fired it and stuck the pencil in the living room wall.
I won’t print all the one liners here, since this is a family blog, but it began with:
“Let me see that (adjectives deleted) magazine!”
It ended in laughter and a lesson on repairing plaster, but subsequent projects were scrutinized to a greater degree.
In my book, When Evil Chooses You, there’s a passage where Zach is lying about the scar he has on his thumb. The lie, the story of an Erector Set project gone bad, is based on the true story of another incident in our living room. In the real story, it was my dad who ended up bleeding.
This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner, or if you would like to join in on the fun, you can follow this link to participate and to see the one-liners from the other participants.
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